About Seopler

Based in Dublin, Ireland, start-up Seopler is a cloud-based SEO crawler and website auditor that generates automatic SEO reports for its clients. It works with digital marketing agencies, as well as individual website owners and enterprise clients, such as Nissan Ireland. Seopler was preparing to officially launch its business at the Web Summit in Dublin on November 3rd and was looking for the right cloud provider to help it launch successfully and grow over the longer term.

The search begins

Seopler helps companies by conducting SEO audits of websites, providing information which can improve search page rankings. These audits are generated by an SEO “spider” which trawls websites to provide information on elements of the site that are affecting search rankings - such as whether the page has too many links or not enough of the page’s content is accurately described. This information is put into PDF reports that advise clients on changes they can make to improve SEO. Like many new start-ups, Seopler used cloud based servers while it was developing and testing its software, but knew that it needed to scale up its cloud infrastructure when it officially launched.

Not ranked highly

Seopler was initially using a VM based hosting service from a well-known cloud provider after being enticed by a discount, but the downsides soon made themselves apparent. Before Seopler could even start using the old cloud product it had to spend days reading online manuals to get to grips with using the web portal. It then took another few days for Seopler to configure its servers and write the necessary scripts, taking up more precious time. Once Seopler finally started using its service, servers were generally running slow and searches were often taking longer than they should. Despite only using VM servers for short amounts of time for testing and rarely at full capacity, hosting costs were getting out of control. On top of that, if Seopler needed to speak to a human for support rather than using the online trouble-shooter it was being charged for the privilege. The company did not anticipate spending so much at the testing phase and it soon became clear that Seopler needed to look for another cloud solution, one that could better serve its business needs and provide good value for money.

To add a sense of urgency, Seopler was chosen to present and demonstrate its services at the Web Summit Alpha Program in Dublin, so had a hard deadline to soft launch on 3rd November 2015. Seopler needed to test its software thoroughly to ensure it would perform seamlessly at the event and cope with intense use. It also needed to find the right cloud hosting service to keep costs within budget and allow the business to scale post-launch. But time was ticking.

A top result

Seopler started talking to ElasticHosts because of its solid reputation in the UK cloud market. Since Seopler’s SEO search software is Linux based, it was also particularly interested to hear about the potential of ElasticHosts’ next generation Linux container product. ElasticHosts explained that Seopler could not only run its application completely on Linux Containers rather than VMs, but it could also benefit from the usage-based billing and autoscaling unique to ElasticHosts Containers. When Seopler moved over to ElasticHosts’ Containers service, it immediately found the portal much easier to use with everything setup in a matter of hours.

Once up and running, Seopler found that its software performed seamlessly and that the Linux containers scaled automatically to meet demand, as promised. Seopler saved 75% on hosting costs using ElasticHosts Containers compared with VMs and never paid for periods when servers were lying idle. When it needed support Seopler could always get through to someone at ElasticHosts who knew its business, could answer any questions and knew how to solve its problems. As a start-up reliant on IT for its business, Seopler found the ideal cloud solution in ElasticHosts Containers. It launched on time and on budget at the Web Alpha Summit on 3rd November 2015 and since then couldn’t be happier with its cloud service. Seopler can now fluidly scale to meet increased customer demands and will only ever pay for the capacity it uses.

“Working with ElasticHosts’ has blown us away and exceeded all our expectations,” said Graham O’Shea, CEO of Seopler. “Linux containers have reduced our total hosting costs by 75% compared with virtual machines, despite using more servers now than we did before. We are confident that our containers can take whatever demands are thrown at them and still deliver a first-rate service to our customers. On top of reducing our operational costs, usage-billing has also allowed us to better understand the profitability of our services so we can bill clients more appropriately. We are looking forward to fully launching globally next year and working with ElasticHosts to grow our business further.”

Seopler is now looking to utilise ElasticHosts’ network of global data centres in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia to expand its service to new customers in these regions. For Seopler, ElasticHosts Containers has been the best cloud hosting solution for them and is the perfect launchpad to realise its global ambitions.